How Nonprofits Made The LGBTQ Movement Straighter

Myrl Beam started to notice the ways big philanthropy, corporate sponsors, and wealthy donors stymied the LGBTQ movement from his own experiences working in nonprofits. He found it hard “seeing how difficult it was for people with the very best of intentions to do the kind of work that they wanted to be doing,” he tells us. “To have impact on the world that they wanted to be having.”

Now assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, Beam has written Gay Inc: The Nonprofitization of Queer Politics, about how a radically contrarian, intersectional, and anti-authoritarian movement took a conservative turn in the past three decades as LGBTQ organizations began to seek out wealthy donors who would support them.

In this podcast, Beam argues that the movement’s embrace of the nonprofit model has had an enormous and troubling impact on a once-radical movement. He critiques the movement’s focus on marriage equality, an issue of less importance to vast swaths of LGBTQ people who face pressing problems like poverty, unaffordable housing, and inadequate healthcare. Beam also laments how following society’s dominant norms of marriage and kids has limited, rather than expanded, the horizons of queer life today.

For four years, Amy was the Africa Correspondent for PRI’s The World. She has also reported for NPR, PBS television, the BBC World Service, and The Guardian. Amy’s television investigation Sudan: The Quick and the Terrible was nominated for an Emmy Award. In 2011, she launched Tiny Spark, which investigates nonprofits, philanthropy and international aid. It was acquired by The Nonprofit Quarterly in 2018.

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